lizvogel

Revision generally comes to me in one of two ways. There's the reading-through of the text, when I come across something that just doesn't ring right or could be better. Those usually aren't too hard to work the new text in (though if something was wrong the first time, there's no guarantee that I can come up with the right thing now). And then there's the snippets of words that come to me when I'm not looking at the existing manuscript, in fact often nowhere near it; sometimes just a line or a phrase, sometimes half a scene of new content. These typically get scribbled down by hand on whatever paper I can reach at the time, and then fitted in later. Sometimes they actually do fit where I'd envisioned them, but more often I've misremembered the existing text just enough that the new stuff has nowhere to go, or crashes into the existing with that horrible crunching sound and shrapnel everywhere. And that's if the new stuff came with a specific spot in mind; just as often it's a bit that I like or that adds something important, and it needs to go somewhere, but I have to canvass the existing text to figure out where. And then comes the roadblock or the shrapnel....

This current revision pass of Highway of Mirrors has had plenty of both kinds. I'm now down to the last few handwritten bits that need to be fitted in, and of course these are the hard ones; the easy ones got done already. There's at least one bit that I really like that I don't think I'm going to be able to use; it would add a lovely oomph to the figuring-out-the-spy-plot part, but there's no way my characters could acquire the information in question -- and making a way would probably require another 20k words, all of which would be a distraction from what the novel's really about. So, no.

One bit is a two-parter; I came up with the perfect way to work in the set-up reference a couple days ago (when I needed to be getting ready for work, of course), and now I need to scan through the later chapters to figure out where the follow-up goes.

Another bit is adding some needed depth to the antagonist's characterization, and that too requires writing a new chunk to fit it into. But in this case, the point in the story where it really needs to go happens to coincide with one of the weaker scenes in the novel. So, as is often the case, put two problems together to create a solution. I'm having to effectively write a whole new scene to slip this into the background of, but I'll have less summarizing and more actual story when I'm done.

Doesn't mean I'm enjoying the process, though. ;-P

Oh, god, why did I think I could revise this thing? Someone, please, shoot me now.






No, no, it's okay, really. Breathe. Fix the logic inconsistency, then print out a nice, clean copy and give it a read from there.

I came up with another new novel idea yesterday/night before. It's somewhere between litfic and romance, which is not my usual thing at all. But in the course of one evening's I-should-be-sleeping musing, I got the whole story line, including what feels like key scenes for all the major turning points; I even remembered most of it the next morning. You don't argue with that.

...I may need to learn Italian.

Or at least find a really good consultant who knows Italian. Aside from language skills I don't have, this one will involve lots of Italian architecture and culture and such. An interesting side-effect of being a writer: I've never been all that interested in Italian language or culture beyond the basic of foreign travel = neat, but now I find myself half in love with it, because these characters are. My housemate tells me that normal people don't do this.

This is the third new novel idea I've come up with in the past couple of weeks. And that's not counting the couple of short story ideas that have cropped up in the same period of time. If my brain were half as focused on the thing it's supposed to be working on as it is on creating shiny new distractions I can't work on for ages yet, I'd be done by now.

...or, the genesis of an idea.

One of the side-effects of deciding to finally send "Rising to the Occasion" out into slush-land was that I re-read it, and one of the effects of that was that the characters moved back in and took over my brain. I've even scribbled down a few snippets, though it's all been slice-of-life stuff that probably doesn't belong anywhere and certainly doesn't count toward word-quotas until/unless it acquires a plot.

Today I happened to glance over some of the ideas I'd brainstormed and rejected for the first story, one of which still catches my fancy... but it'd have to be set a couple of years after the first one, and I'd like to do some more stories in the series first, if series there is to be. (Which is probably something that should wait til I've at least sold the first one, but writer-brain will persist in these things.) There was one element of that idea, though, that just didn't fit, entertaining though an ice-imp potentially is. ("Imps are a myth." "Yes, I know, but....") But it might be enough to carry a story by itself... and then I went to take a shower, which I should have known was asking for trouble. (All the best ideas come in the shower.) Somewhere between the shampoo and the hot water running lukewarm, it acquired a setting, and I worked out how the main character would get involved. And then while I was getting dressed, it went and evolved a name.

So now I really had better finish up the Haley short-story, so I can make room for "A Cold Day in Spells". (Yes, I really did go there. Sorry.)

Coming into Chapter 2 of Falling From Ground, I had the problem that I was looking at a giant unrelieved block of navel-gazing. Some of that's inevitable and even appropriate -- the MC's got quite a mess inside his head that he needs to sort out -- but there needs to be something actually happening, too, as leavening. And so when action starts happening that is related to the mess, in a few chapters, it won't be too much of a change of pace.

Went out to dinner with the housemate and tossed the problem around, and now someone's following him. Don't know who or why, yet, but that's okay. But the words still weren't happening. I'm coming up on end-of-month, and despite having sailed well over quota last month, I'm looking at a hell of a push to make word-count this time.

This is incredibly frustrating and more than a little scary. Beginnings are supposed to be the easy part! But then I got to thinking about the Haley novel, and how I had to re-research Zurich three times. And most of the messing-about-in-Zurich stuff is in the earlier parts.... So I checked my notes:

It took me five months to write Chapter 2 of Haley.

And something like nine months for the second chapter of Highway of Mirrors, though there's some first-novel learning-curve there. Which means this isn't a sign that this novel is going horribly off the rails, or that even the easy parts will be hard and nothing will ever be easy again. This is just part of my process.

It makes sense, when the enthusiasm for a new project meets the tedium of actually making it happen. And it's not necessarily a part of my process that I have to keep unaltered; I still want to make quota for this month, if I can. And I don't think the lull is due to any back-brain work that needs to be done: I can still generate world-building at the drop of a keystroke, for example. But it's useful to know that this is a thing I do, and right about at this point in a new novel, pretty consistently.

Now, get back to work.

I'm still having trouble getting into the main character's head. Attempts at self-immersion are leaving me cold, and my brain seems to have an infinite resource of distractions to dangle before me. And I still don't wanna; all the personal stuff aside, all that emotional intensity just sounds exhausting.

The housemate suggests it's due to stress, and she may be right. In addition to all the usual (and some of it more so than usual), there's a couple of sizable house projects that need to be done this summer (or at least before winter, and fall is such an uncertain thing), and we're fast running out of summer.


The other problem is that this novel seems to be insisting on being written piecemeal. I've always jotted bits down in advance of where I'm working, though I try to keep it to a minimum; for this one, that's almost all I'm doing, and when I do manage to write a longer passage in order, I'm often not entirely happy with it.

This is a frustrating way to write: I'll push out a couple hundred words, then shut down the writing laptop and go do something else -- only to have the perfect phrase for that concept, or the right way to connect those three bits and in what order, pop into my head insistently. (I'm going through a lot of post-it notes.) And while I have jigsawed together scenes before, and they've worked well and readers couldn't see the seams, I don't fancy writing an entire novel that way.


And then there's the worldbuilding. I'm normally not much for in-advance worldbuilding -- what I need to know will come to me when I need it, and there's no sense fussing about with it before that -- but in this case, I've got worldbuilding coming out my ears. And every time I try to focus on the necessary character stuff, I get more of it -- Mars has got political backstory that says all kinds of things about the culture on Earth at that point, and political, social, and aesthetic characteristics keep turning up in nearly every paragraph. I honestly can't tell if I'm offering the reader interesting tidbits about a complex new world or info-dumping it to death.


I am tempted, deeply tempted, to jump ahead to one of the key scenes that I've got clear in my head, which feels like it's at least in chapter 4 and possibly chapter 8 or later -- which could mean anything, as I've never been good at predicting how long it'll take to get to something in a book. (And it could be that what this story really needs is to have the later thing shoved forward, and figure out more stuff to put in after; it wouldn't be the first time.) And just start writing from there, forwards and backwards as need be. This is not a thing I do; I'll jot bits of a future scene as they come to me, yes, but I've learned the hard way not to commit to them, lest the scene no longer fits when I write up to it. Not to mention the carrot effect. Better by far to write as close to chronologically as I can. And yet, that scene is the one I'm feeling; I can hear the character voices, feel the setting, all that stuff that says this scene is Right. It even has its own specific theme song. (Though the soundtrack is the one thing about the whole novel that's going easily, so what does that prove?)

And quite frankly, if I sit down to write that scene and even that runs aground, I'm going to be seriously tempted to bin the whole novel. Which, before anyone suggests it, is not the right answer here.

retro-posted 8-25-14

I had planned to take the next couple of months off, or at least easy, writing-wise. Haley was by far the hardest thing I've written in a lot of ways, and I figured I'd be a lot better off with some recovery time before tackling another novel's complexities.

I started Falling From Ground on Wednesday.

Having figured out the name issue, words leapt into my head, and kept insisting on themselves in that "We're not leaving until you write us down" way. It's always a sign when that happens, so I scrambled about and started typing. I've jotted down other snippets and things, but this one went into an official file named CHAPTER.01, so the novel really is begun.

That snippet did bring other snippets with it, but they kept not quite fitting together and side-tracking and.... I've said before that I'm an intuitive writer, and having to stop every couple of sentences to Figure Something Out is not the way I write. Except when it is, which was far too much of the last novel. I don't like it. It's not fun. And one of the reasons I wanted some time off is that I really wanted to get some space between me and that way of working, in hopes that it would go away and not come back and I could return to just transcribing my back-brain's product. So even though I got a respectable chunk (for me) done, I was not entirely happy with it.

In fact, I was funking out a bit about how this might be the new normal. It didn't help that the short-story idea I've been letting percolate hasn't been coming together, and it seemed to need me to sit down and brainstorm, up in the front of the brain and deliberately, something about the MC. Which, I just, NO.

Somewhere in the process of whining about all this to my housemate, it occurred to me that I might be trying to figure things out in advance not because that's what this story needs, but because I was so disconcerted about the surprise additional 15,000 words on the first book, and I so disliked the constant brick-walling on the third one as some new problem reared its head, that I've been over-compensating to try to avoid that. Maybe what I should do is just sit down and see what words happen.

As soon as I said that, the MC promptly named herself. And the snippet of words that had the seed of the story idea came back sounding like an opportunity and not a wall.

And I did sit down, and several hundred words flowed out of my fingers as if somebody's finally turned on the faucet. And when I thought I'd hit a good stopping point, and was on the verge of shutting down for the night, more words appeared. And more words, and more.... I think I did the final save-and-backup four or five times before my brain stopped giving me oh-just-one-bit-more. I've got an MC and a SC and a bunch of world-building and I didn't have to plan out one bit of it in advance.

So it's follow the short story and see where it leads. And for FFG, it's maybe get some sleep so you can keep the X in mind that Y is wending toward, but otherwise, stop stopping and trying to figure things out; you had an idea before, self, just roll with it. Your back-brain doesn't generally steer you wrong, so stop roadblocking it, already.

Sometimes you need to check the road map. But sometimes, you just need to get in the car and drive.

Yesterday, I took the penultimate scene, previously written and naggingly unsatisfactory, and completely overhauled it, adding emotion and stage business and a practical reason for it to exist in the first place, cutting chunks and changing others and adding half again its length. I think it's better now; at the very least, there's certainly more of it.

This must be how the word-vomit crowd writes. My god, it's exhausting. I can't imagine why anyone would do this to themselves on a regular basis. I'd pushed out the original version of the scene on the grounds that I had to write something, if only so I could have something to fix. And it was the right approach for this scene, this time, but dear lord, I'm glad I don't do it that way all the time.

Also, I figured out what was wrong with the end of the scene. It wasn't any of the things I'd thought of before, and I can't believe I didn't see it sooner.

And today, I just have the last scene to tackle. It's coming incrementally, and slowly, but at least it's coming. So far, anyway. And much of it's coming jigsaw-style, which is a frustrating way to work, but is a damned sight better than nothing and seems to produce just as good results in the end. Onward.